Event Details

Groupon's Groupinar Speaker Series, a collection of talks and forums for sharing information on anything and everything related to tech, start-ups, and new, innovative ideas!

Come join Groupon to learn and engage with guest speaker Noah Sussman, a consultant who mostly works with Fortune 500 media companies in New York.

Continuous Improvement

Who is Noah Sussman?

Noah Sussman is a consultant who mostly works with Fortune 500 media companies in New York. Since 1999 he has been helping bricks-and-mortar businesses to figure out how to operate online.

Noah has overseen the build-out of continuous delivery infrastructure for eCommerce innovators such as Etsy and Barnes & Noble. At Etsy he was instrumental in scaling the continuous integration (CI) system, enabling a velocity of 50 or more daily deployments to production.

Noah lives in Lower Manhattan with his wife and two cats. Feel free to follow Noah on twitter, his twitter handle is @noahsussman.

What is the talk about?

The past few years have seen a phenomenon of software organizations abandoning traditional release cycles in favor of daily or even hourly deployments. The emergence of a new, rapid software development workflow has raised questions regarding the role of test and QA in a product's life cycle. When there is no QA phase, can there still be QA?

Indeed, as the speed of product development changes, risk must be assessed differently. A monthly release cycle provides time to assure a product is reasonably free of defects. In a rapid release cycle, such assurance is impossible. Quality instead comes to mean assuring that the product is capable of recovering from defects.

I will discuss how software risk mitigation practice changes as the speed of development increases. And I will explore the idea that recovering from failure is a far more pragmatic goal than preventing failure in the first place.